Stick it to the Man
by HoldoutTrout
Summary: Leia is a great mom. She has the Force. Her son has nightmares and an unhealthy obsession with all things Imperial and Dark Side. She has a Bad Feeling about that. Han agrees: it's time for a Family Vacation.


The thing was, Leia didn't care much for having "balance in the Force." Okay, so she didn't want to go careening down the slope of the dark side, twisting and bending and breaking her body by using force lightning or manipulating the minds of billions and billions of sentient beings across the galaxy, but she also didn't much care for some of the distant passivity she heard from Luke these days.

Leia had been, and remained, a woman of action.

So when her son-her bright, beautiful, intelligent, force-sensitive son-started having screaming nightmares and turning broody and melancholy during the day-not to mention reading a few too many war journals focusing on the atrocities that his grandfather had committed, she decided it was time for a Family Vacation.

Family Vacation.

Was there any more terrifying phrase on any planet in the New Republic?

Certainly not to her son, who immediately began stocking his personal reader with _The Unabridged Correspondence of the Imperial Forces: Declassified and Annotated with an Introduction by Serrous Miklam_. It took up a staggering percentage of the reader's storage space. Ben had read it twice already.

Han reacted to the idea of a Family Vacation with a visible shudder. "Isn't there any other option?" he complained.

Leia showed him Ben's reader.

"I'll clear my schedule," he said. "But I got a bad feeling about this."

So did Leia.

They made up a tentative itinerary, of course: swing by the remnants of Alderaan ("But it's boring!" "Historic." "Same thing."), hit up Lando's new venture ("It's a theme park, I think. It might be fun!" (It wasn't.)), visit the Jedi Academy ("Luke wants him to enroll already but I think a few more years.") and then wander past a few more traditional Family Vacation spots in a leisurely trip back home.

Of course, nothing went as planned, which was sort of the idea. In the time Leia and Han had known each other, exactly nothing in their lives had gone as planned. And they'd already known that saying this trip was a Family Vacation was just begging the universe to intervene with some massive galactic conspiracy to unravel or a Hrvathian Craw-beast to outrun or a broken hyperspace motivator that would force a maddeningly slow journey across the wide expanse of space.

What they got, of course, was a terrifying descent into a dead planet to rescue royalty (a prince, as it turned out, and distantly related to Leia), a death-defying escape from said planet, and a minor side trip to repair the Falcon where it turned out a nascent Dark Lord was hiding, building his influence and power-and who also appeared to be the source of the screaming nightmares her son had been having.

Well, Han and Leia had some experience with Dark Lords, and this one wasn't all that impressive.

"Snoke. What kind of name is that?" Han had said when confronted with said Dark Lord. "At least Darth Vader sounded impressive. And do you bad guys always shop at the same place? Discount Faded Black Robes R Us?" He snorted. "You probably have a giant Death Star hidden somewhere along the Outer Rim. Just like the original, only bigger!"

Leia loved her husband. He was especially good at distracting evil overlords with delusions of grandeur while she helped direct her son-he had always had a gift for hiding using the Force-to set charges around the building.

Leia, not being a complete idiot, had the foresight to monitor the Force and keep Snoke from reaching out to her son to further twist him or scar him. Honestly, what was it with manipulative little shit-lords trying to turn members of her family to the dark side? She was definitely going to have some words with Luke about teaching his students to protect their minds first and worry about balancing on one hand while levitating rocks second.

Charges set, evil overlord distracted (Han was going to need a new jacket, but Leia thought he'd recover pretty quickly, all things considered), they made a typically last-minute break for the Falcon, and somehow managed to escape before they blew the dead planet to space rubble.

They watched the sensors for a few hours to make sure no one else had made it off alive, and then headed off to go see Uncle Luke, who'd managed to find a treasure trove of old Jedi documents that was so incredibly dense it made _The Unabridged Correspondence of the Imperial Forces_ look positively frivolous in comparison.

Ben deleted everything else from his reader, copied the Jedi documents, and started reading.


End file.
